Nintendo wins $2.4M in Switch emulator lawsuit, Yuzu to shut down

polygon.com:

Makers of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu owe Nintendo $2.4 million after reaching a settlement with the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom developer, following a lawsuit over the open-source emulator just last week. Both Nintendo and Tropic Haze, the company behind Yuzu, filed for a final judgment and permanent injunction on Monday, according to court documents, after Nintendo accused the Yuzu makers of copyright infringement, circumvention of Nintendo’s Switch protections, and selling those circumvention technologies as Yuzu, among other things.

The settlement is pending a judge’s approval, however.

Yuzu is a free Nintendo Switch emulator that was released in 2018 months after Nintendo launched the Nintendo Switch. It’s a piece of software that lets people play Nintendo Switch games on their computers or phones — including Tears of the Kingdom, which Nintendo cited in its lawsuit, saying Yuzu let people play leaked copies of the game early. Specifically, Nintendo said more than 1 million people played the game before the release date because of the leaked copies. Yuzu doesn’t offer pirated or leaked games itself, but Nintendo targeted the company because the emulator is one of the few ways to play those games.

Beyond the money, the terms of the settlement dictate Tropic Haze will have to stop operations on Yuzu entirely — it can’t distribute it in any way, nor can it market it on its website or social media. Yuzu will also have to give up its domain name, which is still active at the time of writing. Yuzu’s $30,000 per month Patreon is still up, too.

In a statement published on Discord, Yuzu maker Bunnei confirmed that anything related to Yuzu will come offline.

“Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites,” Bunnei wrote. “We hope our